Lifecycles

Lifecycles allow you to control the way releases are promoted between environments. Lifecycles enable a number of advanced deployment workflow features:

Control the order of promotion: for example, to prevent a release being deployed to Production if it hasn't been deployed to Staging

Automate the deployment to environments: for example, automatically deploy to Test as soon as a release is created

Retention policies: specify the number of releases to keep depending on how far they have progressed through the lifecycle

A Lifecycle is defined by phases. Each phase can have one or more environments. And each environment can be defined as an automatic deployment environment or a manual deployment environment. Each phase can have a set number of environments that must be released to before the next phase is available for deployment.

A Lifecycle can have a default retention policy defined and each phase inherits this policy or can also have it's own policy defined.

Managing Lifecycles

Lifecycle management can be found under Library and then Lifecycles.

To add a new Lifecycle click on the Add Lifecycle button.

To start with you define a Name, description and default retention policy for the whole Lifecycle. Each phase will inherit the Lifecycle retention policy unless it's own is defined.

Once these initial details are defined you can add your first phase.

Lifecycle Phases

Phases define the deployment pipeline. A phase must have a complete successful deployment before further phases are able to be deployed to.

To add a phase click the + Add Phase button.

Once you have named the phase, you can add environments.

You can define if this environment is automatically deployed to when the release enters the phase, or it is a manual deployment. Automatic deployment will send a release to the environment as soon as the phase becomes available for deployment. Automatic deployment environments are denoted by a lightning bolt icon next to the environment (see below).

Automatic Release Creation
If you have a project setup with Automatic Release Creation and set your first phase and environment to automatically deploy, pushing a package to the internal library will trigger both a release, and a deployment to that environment. A hands off deployment triggered by a build server push!

Once all of your phases are defined your Lifecycle has a 'tree view'.

It shows the flow of the deployment in a visual way.

No Progression

If you want to be able to deploy to any environment at any time then simply create a single phase which has Phase Progression set to All must complete and includes all your environments.

Lifecycles and Projects

A project can only be deployed to any environments defined in their lifecycle.

The overview for a project now shows where a release is up to on the deployment process.

You can see which environments have been released to and what is available for release via the Lifecycle tree.